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bigs

91 karma · joined October 12, 2024

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bigs··on How to negotiate your salary package
It happened for me once by pure chance.

I was looking to leave a secondment I was on, and received an offer, right as the leader of the client I was seconded to said we’d like to take you on permanently and we’ve cleared it with your company, here’s the offer. I used that as leverage and left.

Otherwise, I agree, it’s a snowball chance in hell to coincide them.

bigs··on Ask HN: How are parents who program teaching their kids today?
My 8yo has an iPad with Osmo Awbie which he loves. You use physical tiles to program steps in a logic game like “move right 3”, “turn 90deg”…

They have a bunch of other programs too but for some reason I seem to only be able to find them on Amazon now.

He did want to create Roblox levels and Blender based characters and it was just too much to start with.

bigs··on Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment
Hopefully after living a long and fulfilling life? Geez
bigs··on The role of developer skills in agentic coding
The tortoise and the hare is an important point to raise - this is exactly how I feel.

But how long before AI is Good Enough that the point is irrelevant?

bigs··on Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)
Maybe because others aren’t “disrupting” everyone else
bigs··on How to know when it's time to go
I agree with this outcome. When you do raise issues nothing gets done about them and so if you continue down that path they will see the writing on the wall and plan your replacement.

“Everything is fine” until a key milestone is hit - it’s time to move on, or there’s an internal role you’d like to apply for.

bigs··on Choosing death penalty by firing squad because it's safer
…does he think it’s “safer”?
bigs··on Executive wealth as a factor in return-to-office
This remote colleagues problem is my issue. I don’t mind coming back in (except the cost) but it is very irritating and pointless as I’m a project manager with dispersed teams all across the country (and some in other countries). I come into the office, say hi to a few people I know, get on Teams calls all day in an open plan office with less privacy than at home, then commute home again.
bigs··on HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls
We as end users have no agency in the relationship with vendors.
bigs··on Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads
This write up is fantastic
bigs··on Ask HN: Going from Data Engineer to Platform/Infra Engineer Advice
Sorry I don’t have advice but as someone who started in infra before cloud, and has recently been involved in data (Fabric, PowerBI) programs, don’t take the steep learning curve of infra lightly.

You might think there was quite a lot of depth to learn in data.. wait till you see infra. Modern cloud environments also hide a lot of the technical stuff away so a basic course in understanding networking (TCP/IP, DNS, proxies, caching and so on) may be a good starting place.

bigs··on Couriers mystified by the algorithms that control their jobs
Sounds pretty close to the dystopian predictions…….
bigs··on 'Mainlined into UK's veins': Labour announces public rollout of AI
Wasn’t NHS data anonymised, split into sets and sold a decade ago, then some corp bought multiple sets of the data and combined them easily, de-anonymising it?
bigs··on If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?
Or you may find they write higher quality code - less bugs, more performant code, or so on.
bigs··on Web page annoyances that I don't inflict on you
Why should web browsers treat http like a bug? Many sites don’t need https.
bigs··on Meta is killing off its AI-powered Instagram and Facebook profiles
In what dystopian world did they think this was what their customers want? Oh right I forgot the end user is not their customer.
bigs··on Show HN: Decentralized Email and Storage
From the FAQ it appears to be similar to Protonmail - emails stored on their servers, however the key “decentralized” difference being that you locally hold the encryption key so any attack on the server can’t decrypt the emails as you hold the key (unlike Protonmail who holds them).

I don’t know the tech details of either product myself I’ve just re-iterated their FAQ entry.

bigs··on Settlement for Australian users impacted by Cambridge Analytica incident
How do you know if a friend installed This is Your Digital Life?
bigs··on Sharing new research, models, and datasets from Meta FAIR
Don’t you love the doublespeak of using “FAIR” as well!
bigs··on Parkinson's Law: It’s real, so use it
I work in a large law firm and see similar outcomes, coming from a similar fast paced background.

I’ve drawn a different conclusion as to “why” though. Law firms are inherently risk averse. As such things do take time to dot the i’s, and that is more important than the time or financials.

I look at it through the project management lens of the three constraints: Quality, Time and Cost.

The law firm (and potentially your cloud provider) has prioritised Quality. Either Time or Cost take a hit.

High quality + quick = costly. High quality + low cost = a long time.

bigs··on Devin is now generally available
I always wonder how enforceable these blanket rights would be in court. Didn’t Meta claim to own end users’ photos in the T&Cs back around 2009 and it got challenged and shot down (ianal)?
bigs··on Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals
They’re generalising to say the world uses Apple, Google, Microsoft, Zoom, Cisco, Tesla, and so on… US tech stocks. We use them and they gain revenue and profit.

Of course there are many successful tech co’s outside the US but (and I haven’t looked) I imagine the US tech stocks must overshadow every other countries tech sector.

bigs··on Ask HN: How can we make restaurant menus better with tech?
How many bits of paper does a restaurant need? How much electricity does their webpage menu use running 24/7.

I can’t tell if you’re joking but no ESG professional would care about a paper menu’s impact sorry.

bigs··on New physical AWS Data Transfer Terminals let you upload to the cloud faster
Also gotta think of what else is using the corporate internet pipe you can’t drown it in one aws upload for days.
bigs··on New physical AWS Data Transfer Terminals let you upload to the cloud faster
A few years ago there was definitely document processing automation and query based filtering but still alot of human work.

I assume you’re right and AI now does some of the work but I doubt all of it. Also how reliable would the AI be… you’d hate to not have critical evidence at trial because you trusted the AI fully and it missed something.

Discovery data includes audio, video, social site data, as well as the usual documents and emails.

bigs··on New physical AWS Data Transfer Terminals let you upload to the cloud faster
Hmm. A couple years ago I think one large firm I knew their aws instance had about 400tb I think. Constantly growing with new cases.

They had instances around the world this was just one.

bigs··on Ask questions of SQLite databases and CSV/JSON files in your terminal
They’re saying that LLM’s are not reliable for correctness. My experience with LLM’s so far agrees with that.

So why use an LLM when you can use sql queries directly and know the query is correct?

bigs··on Modern cars are surveillance devices on wheels with major privacy risks
Yes but no one with power will do anything about this. And all the other blatant privacy violations.

Hell powerful people can’t even agree to slow down destroying the earth!

bigs··on Ask HN: How can we make restaurant menus better with tech?
QR codes are annoying why do we need tech in everything? Paper menus are good
bigs··on New physical AWS Data Transfer Terminals let you upload to the cloud faster
Or law firms with large discovery data sets
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